Churn and be churned

Last month I went do the EverTrust bank bonus. We had to go to a local branch. The first we went, I didn’t bring the needed $500 deposit (I only brought $100 as that was the minimum needed for no fees). They also wanted to pull our Chex records, which I had frozen.

So we were about to leave, and the banker asks: “hey would you like some cookies?”

She points at a table on the other side with cookies.

P2 runs grab them. A little commotion builds up. “OMG we can get these cookies?” “Yes please take as many as you like” “Thank you!”

Banker slides me a makeshift sign-up sheet, with fields “Name”, “Email”, “Phone”, “”signature” and at the top reads “EverTrust Bank Small Business Loan Seminar”. It has two names signed on it. And 28 empty rows.

“Could you sign this?”

Oh I see lol

So I immediately see that they had a small business loan seminar. And basically no one came. So they are scrambling to prop up attendance numbers. Maybe they didn’t intend to ask for this from the beginning but mid-point they figured hey doesn’t hurt to ask.

I can relate, I used to work at a small company and we had printed these makeshift signup sheets all the time. It looks exactly like the ones I used to make on MS Word. I signed it as P2 was grabbing cookies.

Then another banker asks “can we take a photo?”

I’m laughing as this was completely unexpected. “Lol sure why not”

Then all five bankers come out of their cubibles. “Ling Ling, come out, we are going to take a picture!”

We pose in front of the cookies table with four bankers wearing their evertrust company vests, stupefied. Then the lady who took the photo switches with another banker to take another photo.

Lol

I think there’s a high chance that we end up in some local Taiwanese newspaper with that photo. “Taiwanese small business owners get much needed help in the hard business climate”, something like that.

I asked Gemini AI to recreate this photo.

Churn and be churned.

Epilogue: the following week we visited with Chex unfrozen. The banker kept repeating “oh no.. something wrong.. Chex..” but eventually she was able to get supervisor to approve it. I’m about to make my third “direct deposit” in a few days.